Eat your greens!

So the November book sale has come and gone, and we raised £3,444. The June sale almost reached £7,800, giving us just over £11,000 for the year. Not bad for two dozen people or so, working in their spare time, over a few weeks or so, to sell books for two days.
Just goes to show what you can achieve if you really want to do something.

Many thanks to everyone who helped out. Many thanks to everyone who bought books too, or took away freebies at the end. We still had to dump two tonnes of leftover books down in Woolwich.

Now I have a big pile of secondhand/nearly-new books to get through before next June. This year’s stash includes:

• Thomas Pynchon, VIneland (since I liked Gravity’s Rainbow)
• Brand spanking new copy of Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
• Similarly new copy of Nick Webb’s biography of Douglas Adams
• Billy Childish, My Fault
• Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, The Buenos Aires Quintet
• Len Deighton, Faith, Hope and Charity. (I’m curious to find out what happened to Bernard Samson after the rather downbeat ending of the previous trilogy)
• Absolutely pristine, shiny new copy of The Secret Annexe, an anthology of war diarists

Went to see Shoot the Crow last night at the Trafalgar Studios in Whitehall. Very enjoyable play. Four Irish tilers are working on a job. Out front is a pallet of tiles not accounted for on the delivery sheet. They have plans to steal it, and each has his own hopes for the money that they’ll get. A lot of it’s played for laughs, but with some quite poignant moments. Jim Norton (Bishop Len Brennan from Father Ted) puts in an excellent performance. Man, I wish I could talk like him. Him, Orson Welles or James Earl Jones.

Many thanks to absolutely everyone who turned out tonight to help set up the Amnesty book sale. Rachel’s garage is empty and the Church of the Ascension is full of boxes of books, ready to be emptied and set out. We still need lots of help to get the church ready by Saturday, but we’re doing well.

If you came to this site to find out more about Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty, our November book sale is on Saturday, 19th November. We have somewhere in the region of 10,000 books to sell. If you can give any time at all to help, please consider coming along to the church tomorrow or Friday to help set up. We’ll be at the Church of the Ascension in Dartmouth Row from 7 - 9pm on Thursday and Friday night.

If you fancy picking up some decent books at low, low prices, drop by the church on Saturday and have a look at what we’ve got.

I’ve revived this site, after almost a year. It started attracting an awful lot of comment spam, and trackback spam, so I turned off comments and stopped updating it until I’d figured out what to do about spam. Then MT 3.2 came along, with built-in filtering and I got broadband. So I thought, “Why not revive eat your greens?” Indeed. Just need to decide what to do with it now.

Useful stuff that’s come up in the last 12 months:

My flickr account

All new digital photos are being posted there, rather than here. A few old ones are going up too, as I find them on various hard drives scattered about the place. Older photos are still on this site

Joe Clark’s accessibility workshop

“The discussion between Joe and the audience on the subject of real practical issues was most helpful”. Yes indeedy.

Smart playlists in iTunes

Handy guide from Andy Budd on creating playlists from other playlists. My iPod is up to 4,500 songs now, so it’s useful to program it to play songs I rarely listen to.

The War of the Worlds, from Dark Horse Comics.

A serialisation of the original Victorian novel. Updated every Friday.

Live Music Archive

Too much Grateful Dead for my taste, but I’ve downloaded a Camper van Beethoven show from 1988 and shows by the Handsome Family and fIREHOSE.